Sunday, December 14, 2014

The
Daniel
Connell exhibition of paintings and charcoal drawings of labourers
was inaugurated
at Spice Fort hotel on Dec 13, 2014 at a function attended by
cricketer Ajay Jadeja from Delhi, K.J. Sohan, councillor and Fort
Kochi elder,
and art aficionado, Diana.

The
show is called 'Labour', for the paintings and charcoal drawings are
of common folk, the labourers found
in and around Fort
Kochi. Daniel said, ‘Art is about connecting, connecting people.’
He thanked Selvaraj, one of the many labourers he has depicted in the
paintings and drawings decorating the walls of the hotel. He also
thanked representatives of the Australian High Commission who came to
attend.

K.J.
Sohan hailed the second edition of the Kochi-Muziris Biennale (KMB2)
for its showcasing of the
art
and attractions of this area. For 31 years the
Carnival
in Fort Kochi on New Year’s Day has drawn a wide audience to this
500 year-old city that has seen the rule of
three European nations: Portugal, The Netherlands, and Britain. But
now India is looking East, a new direction initiated by Prime
Minister Modi, and having an Australian artist who is familiar
to Cochinites, to exhibit here is not surprising therefore.

Mr
Sohan remarked that as we go about our daily business our eyes gaze
on labourers, but glaze over. We watch but do not observe, or care
to remember
these faces. But Daniel does – he noted Achu who operates a wayside
eatery and works from 6am to 7pm providing food for local workers and travellers (Rs 10
for breakfast); he
was
caught in one
the pictures by Daniel in
KMB1.
The artist has brought the common people together, and brought them
into the mainstream of art. He thanked Daniel for being a strong
force for
the solidarity of society.
As an aside Mr Sohan
said the city has paid for training Achu in culinary arts and
provided a stainless steel shell for
his thattukadanext
to the Cochin Aquatic club at
the entrance channel of the harbour, next to the Corporation building.

Ajay
Jadeja, cricketer of yesteryear
and now a commentator seen often on TV, spoke about coming to know
Daniel on a visit to Australia. He confessed he is new to art, and
Daniel is
the only artist he could call a friend. From Daniel he learned the
lesson that every human is special and artists like Daniel bring it
out in their work. He thanked Daniel for calling on him to be
present. It was Daniel’s coming that made Jadeja appreciate art
and artists – for
his life till
now had
been spent among his team-mates on the
cricketing green. Daniel is
special not only for his paintings, but for the people
he
has touched by
his art.

Daniel Connell at the mike with two of his models, Selvaraj left in Sabarimala black & another labourer.

Selvaraj

Here
are some observations by Daniel
Connell from the brochure brought out on the occasion:

Why
charcoal as medium – it is accessible, relatively environmentally
friendly. Cheap and democratic for everyone can access it. It keeps
the enrgy you put it on with. And it looks temporary and unfinished.

Art
is following as truly as possible an inner desire to discover
something.

Portrait
drawing started by accident when I drew a portrait of an old Muslim
man, a patriarch of the area, as we sat on a street. And next minute
everyone
on the street wanted one and I happily obliged and this was the
accelerator pedal to know the whole community.

I
wanted to underscore the element of time commitment and care, hence
the engagement required in making a drawing as accurate a realist
rendition as possible.

In
these faces … I am not asking them to tell their story ... in this
work I am telling of our meeting and what joy and delight and power
it had for me.

Art
must be personal, otherwise it is design. Love makes the unique in
art.

K.J. Sohan, councillor of Fort Kochi, with KumKum

Our
congratulations
to
Daniel Connell on
another great series of
works;
here is a blog post from the first
Biennale,
two
years ago, with a pic of my grandson, Gael, (and Diana) in front of the mural of Justin
Alan Magridge, Daniel's
friend from South Australia:

http://kochiread.blogspot.in/2013/01/kochi-muziris-biennale-2.html

If
you click on the pic it will unfurl at higher resolution and the
anthropological
notes
accompanying the
mural are
worth reading.

Saturday, December 13, 2014

This
was a subdued gathering of seven readers, but the coverage of poetry
was as international as readers have come to expect at a poetry
session.

Zakia, KumKum, & Talitha

Ramanujan,
Angelou, Graves, Swift, Rice, Syzmborska, and Paz is an unusual
combination; one of them may not be a poet at all. All were from the
20th century, except Swift. So short a list, yet count two Nobels.

KumKum, Talitha, Preeti, Pamela, & Zakia (back to camera)

There
was not only variety in the poetry, but an even greater variety in the
kinds of things these poets did, from writing plays and political
pamphlets to dancing and diplomacy.

Preeti & Pamela

Have
we run out of new poets to explore? Consider four of the seven have
been read at previous sessions. But here we are, happy as could be,
at the end of another reading:

Wednesday, November 19, 2014

Heroes in the ancient
mould do not figure in modern novels. In this famous novel, Herzog, by one of America’s best-known modern authors, Saul Bellow, the protagonist struggles from the early pages after
being thrown out of his own house by a scheming wife of great allure, who declares
she never loved him and then makes off with her husband’s house and friend.

Talitha

We see Herzog picking
up the pieces and going on with a life given to much philosophical rambling
thought on everything under the sun; most important of all – how to live the
good life using every wise guide from Spinoza to Nietzsche. His students in class find his lectures growing more strange and his
looks more distant and self-absorbed. Is he going crazy? Is he the paranoid,
depressive victim, or are his enemies doing him in?

KumKum and son, Reuben (visiting)

Fortunately for him,
two endearing women take turns to bless him with their solicitous affection,
and as the novel ends he is considering whether he will be third-time lucky if
he marries.

Monday, October 13, 2014

Ten
of us met in the verandah outside the dining hall of the CYC, for the
Library was still stowed with furniture. The variety of poems was amazing.

Pablo Neruda was the pen name, later assumed name, of the Chilean poet-diplomat

Six
readers chose British poets, two American, one Finnish, and one Chilean. Since
Oct 2014 was the month of Dylan Thomas’s centenary, three readers decided in
his favour.

Dylan Thomas portrait 1934 by Alfred Janes

One
of the happy outcomes of our poetry sessions is to make the readers aware of
the great wealth of poetry and the unusual people who follow the generally unremunerative profession of poetry. Particularly, when that profession is pursued to the
exclusion of sidelines, as happened in the case of Dylan Thomas.

Wednesday, October 1, 2014

Regarding Somerset Maugham, the critic, Cyril Connolly, wrote: "If all else perish, there will
remain a story-teller's world from Singapore to the Marquesas that is
exclusively and for ever Maugham, a world of verandah and prahu which we enter,
as we do that of Conan Doyle's Baker Street, with a sense of happy and eternal
homecoming." (Sunday Times, 19 December 1965).

Ten readers gathered
in the Lounge of the Yacht Club to read passages from Of Human Bondagethat gave
them insights into the wounded psychology of the hero, Philip Carey, and at the
same time, provided searing picture portraits of life in all the places he
lived.

Sujatha, Pamela, & KumKum

The hero ceaselessly
adventures in quest of meaning in life and pursues his early passion to draw
and paint in Paris. En route he encounters numerous women, all different, all
capable of attracting (and repelling) Philip. His education in life continues,
and he fails at almost everything he tries. His torment at the hands of women,
are as torturous as the buffets of fortune he suffers.

Sunil, Thommo, Govind, Mathew, & Gopa

Readers discussed
Maugham’s other novels and short stories. Nearly everyone had read some Maugham story or novel in the time of youth, but returning to it in maturity gave completely new insights. What was
only a story became a saga of self-discovery.

Thursday, September 4, 2014

Poetry
sessions offer the widest variety of imaginative expression for our
readers. They pose problems, as well, for the mind wants to get to the
bottom of things, and often the poems are elusive as to their
meaning. They suggest different things for different readers.

Elusive

Poems in translation are even more difficult to appreciate for they have
been shorn of their original sounds, and perhaps had their language
conventions turned upside down by the process of translation. Does
Azmi's Urdu formalism make sense in English? Does Césaire's
prose poem convey the nostalgia of the French when translated? Can
Akhmatova be divorced from her soft Russian inflections and yet yield
her treasures?

Nine
readers try to show what can be achieved, mixing American and British
writers with a variety of poets from all over the world.

Thursday, August 14, 2014

On travels when KumKum and I are near enough to a poet’s grave or museum to pay a visit, we go. In this manner we have paid our respects to Keats, Ghalib, Melville, Wharton, Longfellow and Poe, and this time we were driven from Boston to Amherst to see the Emily Dickinson Museum, located in the house where she spent the major part of her life.

Emily Dickinson's house - she worked in the upper right bedroom

The docent who guided a group of seven was a retired lady, specialising in 19th century history, and had an intimate familiarity with the life of ED and her close family (sister Lavinia, brother Austin and future sister-in-law Susan). She said there were many myths about the poet – that she was a recluse, that no one in her lifetime knew she wrote poetry, that she never left Amherst, etc.ED was a fond aunt to children who came to play in the grounds outside
her upper storey bedroom, and would lower shortbread cookies to them in a
basket. There is a museum of her memorabilia in Harvard University, at the Emily
Dickinson Room of the Houghton Library,

which preserves “more than a thousand autograph poems, and some
300 letters, by Emily Dickinson, and is the largest Dickinson collection in the
world, including additionally such treasures as the poet’s Herbarium.” The
herbarium was a collection of pressed specimens of plants ED made in her youth. Replicas of her bureau (chest of drawers), chair and small
table stand in her room stand.

Cherry bureau and small cherry writing table and chair in ED's bedroom

The writing table’s surface is small; it could not have held more than the working sheet of paper she wrote on. The original furniture is at Harvard. It is spare for a poet furnished with such a lavish imagination.
The bureau contained the fascicles (little booklets) into which ED hand-sewed
her precious poems and let them lie.

“The
Johnson edition of 1955 (the old "definitive" edition) of the
complete poems makes choices for the reader -- choices which, unfortunately,
are not always the best. This new edition presents the poetry with all the
variations intact, so that the reader could choose for him/herself a particular
reading when Dickinson herself did not leave a final preference.”

As
for why she did not publish, the docent told us it was because ED had many
alternative words for particular lines in her poems and could not decide. Poets
always have alternatives when they search for the best expressions of their
thoughts, and have to decide which one creates the surprise or the harmony
intended. That is the reason why poets publish revisions in later editions. So an
inability to decide the best word choice could hardly be a reason to desist from
publication.

She
wrote to a contributor in the Atlantic
Monthly, Thomas Higginson, sending four poems and asking his opinion: “say
if my Verse is alive.” This may have been a fateful mistake, for he, not
knowing that she had already written several hundred poems (her output was 1,700+
by the time she died), and being a non-poet himself and a poor judge of
literary merit, as history bears out, “counseled her to work longer and harder
on her poetry before she attempted its publication.” You can read more at

ED
was in a small town devoid of poets, and she had no personal contact with true literary
figures. This Higginson gambit seems to have been her first and only attempt to
get published, and it met with the rebuff of a man who had little capacity to
enter the mind or poetry of ED.

But
the world of poetry did not lose. After her death in 1886 her family discovered
the hand-sewn fascicles in her bureau containing more than a thousand poems. Since it was her
practice to send letters to friends and relatives with poems, and hundreds were
sent, it is quite possible several hundred more are lost, when the receiver
did not preserve those letters and transmit them to the executors of her literary estate.

The
query to Higginson may be the clue to why she did not publish. When a poet of
her outstanding genius stoops to ask a comparative hack his opinion of her
poetry, it is a sign of diffidence, arising from her own high bar for versification
to be considered poetry. She was not convinced her poetry matched the standard she
hoped to attain – that I think is the reason she gave them away as trifles in
letters, often not even bothering to keep a master copy before dispatching them
in chatty missives to friends and relatives.

Her
one visit to Boston (by rail) was to have her eyesight examined. A severe
difficulty in vision set in and this was reflected in her handwriting. In the
annotations for her Herbarium it is minute (8-point), elegant and cursive. It remains
cursive but becomes quite large (16-point) after the difficulty in vision, and later
it takes the form of disjoint printed characters.

A
hundred yards away stands the much more luxurious home connected by a narrow
walkway which she described as "just wide enough for two who love."

KumKum & Joe standing by the walkway from Emily's to the home of her brother, Austin, described by her as 'just wide enough for two who love'

The new home was built for her brother, Austin, by their father, with the
intention of retaining him in Amherst. Austin was also a lawyer like their
father, and like him became the Treasurer of Amherst College, the institution started
by the grandfather. Austin and wife Susan enjoyed the luxuries of life – two live-in
servants, paintings on the wall, plush furniture and an elegant dining room
where they entertained guests. The docent read from a menu for Valentine’s Day
which was on exhibit beside the dining service laid out. It was a sumptuous
meal with many courses suchas might have been served in a royal palace!

As
to why ED did not marry – the question should not even come up in modern times
since the feminist movement has led us to believe that women can do as they wish,
and their fulfillment in life is not necessarily tied to marriage or childbearing.
However, in those times it was uncommon for women to remain unmarried. Then why
ED? She certainly was a vivacious and witty person in her youth, and exchanged
a Valentine’s poem with a young man in her father’s office. KumKum thinks ED
remained single because of her domineering father’s disapproval of the men she considered
favourably as suitors. Is she confusing with Elizabeth Barrett Browning (whom
ED admired)?

But
there may be an alternate explanation. She was after all ready to exercise her
own judgment in many matters, e.g., at a certain point when the revivalist
ardour got too much for her, she ceased going to the Congregationalist church,
and wrote the poem (#236) which begins

Some keep the Sabbath
going to Church –

I keep it, staying at
Home –

She
drifted away from college after ten months at Mount Holyoke. She decided to wear
white. She knew her mind and did as she thought fit. But she was a poet in her
mind and her imagination, one with a reflective bent and a fine ability to
surprise. Perhaps she never found a man whose sympathy for her temperament would
make him a good companion for life.

From The Emily Dickinson Handbook by Gudrun Grabher

She
was no wall-flower; at age 14 she wrote about herself in a letter to a friend,
saying she had no doubt she would be ‘the belle of the ball’ when debutantes
came out at age 17. She certainly had suitors. And being determined
to follow her own thinking, she would not have been lacking in courage to pursue
a relationship, had she found one that suited her singular temperament. The fact
is she found her writing vocation early and pursued that. Her poems have a
quality of arising out of meditation. She must have been alone with her
thoughts much of the time to give birth to such poems as she did. That kind of sensitive,
meditative mind demands a definite sympathy in a potential partner. Could such men, rare at the best of times, have been easy to come by in a small town?

Among
the major influences on her poetry are the Bible and Nature. You can recognize
the hymnal beat of quatrains 8/6/8/6 in much of her poetry. She is full of God, but not as a
conventional pietist might be. Her take on God and his immanence in the world
is akin to that of a mystic, but she does not preach from any particular religious persuasion.

She observed Nature closely and her descriptions yield the particulars of her
observation, such as this:

(#1096)

A
narrow fellow in the grass

Occasionally
rides.

You
may have met him, — did you not?

His
notice sudden is.

The
grass divides as with a comb,

A
spotted shaft is seen;

And
then it closes at your feet

And
opens further on.

He
likes a boggy acre,

A
floor too cool for corn.

Yet
when a boy, and barefoot,

I
more than once, at noon,

Have
passed, I thought, a whiplash

Unbraiding
in the sun;

When,
stooping to secure it,

It
wrinkled and was gone.

…

The
unique signature of her poems lies in the unusual words and pairing of words.
For her Nature was ever new, and she had to find NEW words, or at least, a new word ordering, to capture its eternal newness and pass it on to coming
generations.

KumKum & Joe at Emily Dickinson's grave

The poem I read at her grave in the cemetery (behind a Mobil
gas station on Pleasant Street) was this:

(#214)

I
taste a liquor never brewed –

From
Tankards scooped in Pearl –

Not
all the Frankfort Berries

Yield
such an Alcohol!

Inebriate
of air – am I –

And
Debauchee of Dew –

Reeling
– thro’ endless summer days –

From
inns of molten Blue –

When
“Landlords” turn the drunken Bee

Out
of the Foxglove’s door –

When
Butterflies – renounce their “drams” –

I
shall but drink the more!

Till
Seraphs swing their snowy Hats –

And
Saints – to windows run –

To
see the little Tippler

Leaning
against the – Sun!

A
short round of applause ensued. While Joe was declaiming this in the
presence of a handful of others visiting ED’s grave, his grandson, Gael, was standing
twenty yards off. Later he confessed his embarrassment at the loud and public recitation, and said he saw a visitor shake his head and roll his eyes, as if to
wonder at the brazen behavior of his Opa.

Grand-daughter Elsa reads two poems to Emily at her grave:

'I'm a Nobody Who are you' and 'Tell all the truth but tell it slant'

Then
Elsa, our grand-daughter wanted to read, so I pointed her to a poem in the small book
I bought at the Museum shop:

(#260)

I’m
Nobody! Who are you?

Are
you – Nobody – too?

Then
there’s a pair of us!

Don’t
tell! they’d advertise – you know!

How
dreary – to be – Somebody!

How
public – like a Frog –

To
tell one’s name – the livelong June –

To
an admiring Bog!

(‘livelong
day’ is an alternate version given by ED)

I
consider the second stanza to be her sending up of twitterati whom she’d
foreseen 150 years in advance. Elsa recited another curious one:

(#1263)

Tell
all the truth but tell it slant —

Success
in Circuit lies

Too
bright for our infirm Delight

The
Truth's superb surprise

As
Lightning to the Children eased

With
explanation kind

The
Truth must dazzle gradually

Or
every man be blind —

Grandson Gael before a huge mural in the cemetery with Emily Dickinson beaming over the proceedings

The
Emily Dickinson Museum includes The Homestead, where poet Emily Dickinson was born
and lived most of her life, and the home of the poet’s brother and his family.
The two houses share three acres of the original Dickinson property in the
center of Amherst, Massachusetts.

A
creative and critical collaboratory and digital repository for reading
Dickinson's material, featuring new critical and theoretical work about Emily
Dickinson's writings, biography, reception, and influence. It is a scholarly
resource exploring the potential of the digital environment to reveal new
interpretive material, cultural, historical, and theoretical contexts

http://www.edickinson.org/The Emily Dickinson Archive makes high-resolution images of Dickinson’s surviving manuscripts available in open access, and provides readers with a website through which they can view images of manuscripts held in multiple libraries and archives.http://news.harvard.edu/gazette/story/2013/10/the-digital-dickinson/The story behind the Emily Dickinson Archive, a collaborative project of Harvard University Press and a growing number of repositories that own examples of Dickinson’s original work. The biggest are Houghton Library, Amherst College, and the Boston Public Library.